A co-location facility provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center or warehouse, in which multiple customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications, cloud, and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Such co-location facilities may be shared by the multiple customers. By using co-location facilities of the provider, customers of the provider including telecommunications providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), application service providers, service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business.
Customers co-located at a co-location facility typically lease space or storage capacity for a set duration. A co-location facility provider's goal may be to reduce vacancy rates in the co-location facility to zero, while maintaining a high level of service. A provider may want to prevent its customers from leaving the co-location facility and encourage other customers to join the co-location facility.
Cloud computing refers to the use of dynamically scalable computing resources accessible via a network, such as the Internet. The computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud,” provide one or more services to users. These services may be categorized according to service types, which may include for examples, applications/software, platforms, infrastructure, virtualization, and servers and data storage. The names of service types are often prepended to the phrase “as-a-Service” such that the delivery of applications/software and infrastructure, as examples, may be referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), respectively.
The term “cloud-based services” or, more simply, “cloud services” refers not only to services provided by a cloud, but also to a form of service provisioning in which cloud customers contract with cloud service providers for the online delivery of services provided by the cloud. Cloud service providers manage a public, private, or hybrid cloud to facilitate the online delivery of cloud services to one or more cloud customers. A co-location data center acts as an intermediary between cloud service providers and customers. A co-location data center manages and simplifies multiple contractual relationships between suppliers and consumers, and customizes certain aspects of the cloud service being delivered to map more closely to the requirements of each particular user. Because a co-location data center acts as an intermediary between multiple customer networks and cloud service providers, the co-location data center typically must manage extremely complex networking configurations between a variety of in-house and third party systems, wherein the configurations between these systems may change dynamically as customers begin or end sessions, switch from one cloud service provider to another, or as cloud service providers upgrade their systems. Because of the complex interplay between these systems, it may take a significant amount of time to monitor resource consumption within the co-location data center, detect software and hardware faults, and determine the point of origin of such software and hardware faults so that they may be fixed.